countrymen under abuses." This temper coupled with a commanding material progress makes us impatient with the fault-finder. Yet a promiscuous optimism about everything in particular may be just as harmful as a uniform pessimism. We have to learn the full meaning of specific sources of social weakness in the elimination of which legislation has to play a part. This leads from the temperamental to the business and political difficulty.

It will appear in the clearest light if seen through an illustration about which every reader may easily acquire trustworthy information.

In 1902, I saw in Georgia and Alabama troops of children, many under twelve, working the entire night. I had previously heard every detail of this ugly story, in which northern capital is implicated as much as southern, yet nothing but personal observation would have made me believe the extent to which this blunder goes on in our midst. Whether one finds this evil in New Jersey industries, among Illinois glass-blowers, on the Chicago streets at night, or in the merciless sweating of the clothing trade, it is an excuseless wrong for which no extenuating word can be uttered. It is a source of disease, crime, and social weakness. That it is not a purposed cruelty, does not change the fatality of the result. A kindly employer in Alabama tells me, "Yes, it is bad, but the parents of these children will have it." Every argument reproduces to the letter the excuses of employers two generations ago, when Shaftesbury began his great struggle against child labor in England.

This stunting use of the child in industry is but a

part of what is perhaps the most threatening fact of the new century, the wider and more relentless use of every known agency to keep wages (and therefore the standard of life) as low as possible. This purpose is not malicious or even quite conscious of its end. It results from the enlarged world area on which a fiercer competition now acts. The practical exigency of this commercial struggle will appear to justify every competitive use to which lower and cheaper standards of living can be put. Women, children, negroes, the inhabitants of our new dependencies and every shade of immigrant, will one and all be used like pawns in the great game of immediate business advantage in the markets of the world.

I asked one of the largest employers of labor in the South if he feared the coming of the trade union. "No," he said, "it is one good result of race prejudice, that the negro will enable us in the long run to weaken the trade union so that it cannot harm us. We can keep wages down with the negro, and we can prevent too much organization."

It is in this spirit that the lower standards are to be used. If this purpose should succeed, it has but one issue, the immense strengthening of a plutocratic administration at the top, served by an army of high-salaried helpers, with an élite of skilled and well-paid workmen, but all resting on what would be essentially a serf class of low-paid labor and this mass kept in order by an increased use of military force.

If there is any escape from this peril, it is in the slow building up of that system of labor protection known first as factory legislation. What is best in

this legislation is not something standing apart from, or in antagonism to, the forces of public opinion, but the deliberate and express record of that opinion about the hours and conditions under which it would have a large part of society work and live. In countries like England and Switzerland, no existing agencies have done so much as this form of legislation to save the labor standard from sinking to lower levels. In our own country the same legislation in Massachusetts, incomplete as it is, has worked with admirable results.

The precedent of experience is in all this the only possible guide. Most of the horrors connected with sweating in the making of clothes could be stopped if other states had enforced a legislation as good as that of Massachusetts. The law holds this special evil in check in the city of Boston. The rivalry among our states to attract business or to prevent its escape makes a difficulty which no other nation feels in giving shape to this legislation. A speaker before a committee on child labor in Alabama says, “We get a great advantage over the North, if we work twelve hours and have child labor." For every immediate business interest this appeal is dangerously effective and will long constitute a baffling perplexity in creating that body of regulative measures which is now recognized to be as necessary for the "trust" as for those conditions under which multitudes of women and children work.

It was once believed that the strife of multitudinous private interests, if freely followed, would lead to the maximum of common gain. It was believed that the essence of economic wisdom was merely to

keep hands off.

This position of the extreme individualist, as of the philosophic anarchist, has a rare intellectual fascination. For speculative enchantment, it is easily supreme among social theories. But the moment we touch the world of human action, the moment we arrive where people are hard at work, it appears that this policy of "let alone" is as definitely discarded as the whale-oil lamp. Neither tory nor liberal, republican nor democrat, pretends any longer to "let things work themselves out." Every government, democratic and monarchical as well, deliberately adopts a policy of elaborate legal regulation. Nor is there anywhere a hint that this is to lessen. Communities differ as to the emphasis that shall be placed on social regulations. New Zealand goes to greater lengths than Denmark; Switzerland, in many things, further than England, but all alike accept it as a practical working finality that competitive forces cannot be trusted to work themselves out alone. They are brought under some measure of permanent social regulation. Among men with responsibilities there is now no dispute except as to the forms which this regulation shall assume and the degree to which it shall be carried.

We need no longer call in the socialist to testify against the uncurbed struggle in industry. The last twenty years have taught the lesson so thoroughly to our foremost business men that they are becoming our instructors. Not alone with transportation, but with iron, with textiles, with insurance, with banking, and with many of the commonest products, the unrestrained scramble of private interests is now seen to be intolerable. Good business now sets the limit

can.

To check

to competition by organizing coöperation. and control the excesses of competition has become the mark of first-class ability. A railroad president has been dismissed because "he insists upon fighting other roads instead of working with them." According to his own account, the head of another road owes his appointment to the fact that (in his own words) "I was known to have some aptitude for working with rival interests." Yet the term "legal regulation," as applied to industry, is still an offence to the AmeriHe has not learned that this regulation is but a factor in what we all now agree is the capital fact of industry - organization. The term "industrial organization" carries no offence, but is seen to be the next great step even in further material progress. On the side of capital, organization began for the sake of safer dividends. As business enlarged, and came finally to touch the wide and permanent wants of the consumer, organization from the public point of view was also found to be necessary. This completed organization is impossible without the assistance of legal regulation that is superior to every separate interest.

What is now forced upon every critical observer is the degree and extent of purely chaotic forces on the industrial field. Competition as such has no tendency to remove this mischief, rather indeed to aggravate it when business has reached a given. stage of development. The great lesson that employers have to learn is that organization has done but half its work when their own end alone is systematized. Organization has to pass straight through from top to bottom, including labor as well. A part